1Between Body and Soul
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON was a dangerous place, where sudden reversals of fortune were commonplace. Waves of plague swept repeatedly through the city, littering the streets with piles of corpses that had been healthy people only days before. House fires were a constant menace, another reminder of the vagaries of fate. As one Elizabethan chronicler wrote, “He which at one o’clock was worth five thousand pounds, and, as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of fine silver plate, had not by two o’clock so much as a wooden dish to eat his meat in, nor a house to cover his sorrowful head.” Fire, the giver of warmth and light, was also an agent of calamity. Sex posed equally contradictory possibilities: the act of creating life imperiled its creators; sublime union could result in catastrophic denouement—venereal disease, stillbirths, fatal infections, failed deliveries.
The structures of Elizabethan feeling were fraught with violent contrasts, and the sharpest was between life and death. Reminders of one’s personal mortality were everywhere, beginning for Londoners with the dead plague victims in their streets. The plague embodied the perversities of fate—coming and going mysteriously, striking healthy people down swiftly, leaving physicians baffled. “Whence it cometh, wherof it ariseth, and wherefore it is sent,” a scornful preacher said, “they confess their ignorance.” The medical profession was equally helpless in its treatment of other fatal illnesses; indeed its bleeding and purging remedies often hastened the victims’ demise. But even for the lucky ones who survived conventional treatment, life was always precarious and often short.
The physical facts of death were an everyday presence, impossible to ignore. Bodily decomposition bore witness to the transiency of beauty and the inevitability of decay, underscoring the insignificance of mere mortal life. The notion of the dead body as a banquet for worms pervaded common speech. “A plague o’ both your houses!” cries the dying Mercutio, “they have made worms’ meat of me.” It was difficult to forget that flesh, however lovely or vigorous, was always just a few heartbeats away from putrefaction.
Still, there were ways to keep the specter of death at arm’s length. Early modern people were used to frequent sickness and early death; they cultivated low expectations and stoical resignation, often with the aid of alcohol. The poet John Taylor’s tribute to ale captured its central place in Elizabethan social life: it “doth comfort the heavy and troubled mind; it will make a weeping widow laugh and forget sorrow for her deceased husband … It is the warmest lining of a naked man’s coat; it satiates and assuages hunger and cold; with a toast it is the poor man’s comfort; the shepherd, mower, ploughman, and blacksmith’s most esteemed purchase; it is the tinker’s treasure, the pedlar’s jewel, the beggar’s joy, and the prisoner’s loving nurse.”
More hopeful souls also clung to the redemptive promise of Christian faith. Longings to transcend the vulnerability of a mortal body encouraged the exaltation of an immortal soul. Yet while eternal life offered deliverance from decay, it also included the possibility of endless punishment for sins committed in this life. Wayward believers faced the prospect of a miserable few decades in this world followed by everlasting damnation in the next. Still, there was a way out. Flesh could be redeemed by spirit, and both be reunited after death in the resurrected body. Visions of salvation evoked the promise of eternal wholeness. The question was how to reach that dreamed-of state. Protestants and Catholics disagreed violently, but politics and theology did not necessarily disturb ontology. For most English people, foundational assumptions about the ground of being remained intact; they continued to inhabit an animated cosmos where body and soul blended, where matter was infused with spirit. How those fusions occurred was determined in part by liturgical tradition, but not entirely. There was always a surplus of enchantment in the cultural atmosphere, available for multiple purposes—medicinal, recreational, and even (eventually) financial.
According to the textbook tale, the Enlightenment fostered the transition from enchanted tradition to disenchanted modernity—from a sacred cosmic order based on faith and fear to a rational, secular universe based on Newtonian science, and from a social world stifled by communitarian conformity to one hospitable to individual choice. Enlightenment thinkers, in this tale, were benign rationalists, so committed to the life of reason—to an orderly mind in an orderly cosmos—that they tended to underrate the ungovernable power of passion in human motivation and the unpredictable role of chance in cosmic affairs generally.
For some time now, historians have been complicating this picture. What has emerged is a darker, wilder version of the Enlightenment—a mental habitat more hospitable to occult forces and mysterious vital principles than the textbook version of Enlightenment rationality could ever have been. In this atmosphere, animal spirits shuttled between body and soul, animating the cosmology of divines like Donne and Milton, novelists like Laurence Sterne, and a host of philosophers and scientists who were trying to figure out how visible matter produced invisible thought and feeling. The deeper one probed into these mysteries, the more elusive certainty seemed. The disenchantment of the Anglo-American mind remained precarious and incomplete; patterns of medieval thought persisted in altered form. Enchantment survived enlightenment.
THE AMBIGUITIES OF ENCHANTMENT
Medieval dreams of resurrection melded sacred and secular life, shaping the larger significance of Carnival as well as other festivals. Before the Reformation, English villages joined the rest of Catholic Europe in celebrating the days leading up to Ash Wednesday with a riot of sensuous excess. The annual rituals of Carnival—the parading of giant sausages through the streets, the mock plowing performed by unmarried women—framed food and sex with larger liturgical meaning. Carnival endowed flesh with spirit, prefiguring the posthumous reembodiment of soul in heaven. Meanwhile, here on earth, the fragility of flesh made the experience of the senses all the more piquant and precious.
Everyday devotions enacted theological truths. Catholic preoccupation with Jesus’s bodily suffering flowed from the church’s doctrine of the Incarnation: “the Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Humanity melded with divinity, and worm’s meat became the body of Christ. The interpenetration of body and soul was epitomized in the eucharistic sacrifice—swallowing the God, drinking His blood. The sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, undergirded by the doctrine of transubstantiation, resonated with the sacramental feasting of many indigenous peoples. Despite theologians’ efforts to separate Christ’s godhood and manhood, the Eucharist kept animistic magic at the core of the Christian faith.
The magic of the medieval church sustained a Christian version of an animated cosmos. Spirit interacted with matter at every turn—investing relics, statues, images, and ritual gestures with magical efficacy. The most common ritual gesture available to the laity was the sign of the cross: it was used by ordinary folk to ward off evil spirits along with more palpable dangers, and by priests to exorcise the devil from persons, animals, and objects, as well as to endow organic or material entities with sacramental significance. Holy water was holy because it was blessed by a priest using the sign of the cross, and such blessings benefited body as well as soul. Water, once consecrated, had medical uses as a tonic for sick cows, sheep, and people. Church rituals, talismans, and amulets ensouled the material world, creating an enchanted path between the self and God. Popular understanding of the Eucharist reinforced belief in the physicality of the divine, which broadened to obscure the boundaries between the visible and invisible worlds, encouraging the faith that sacraments could promote physical as well as spiritual well-being. The common practice of baptizing puppies, kittens, lambs, and foals was based on the belief that baptized babies, of whatever species, “got on better” after the ritual had been performed.
Though orthodox thinkers distinguished between religion and magic, village priests and laity merged the two realms by undermining the distinction between prayers and spells or charms. This fostered the popular assumption that mere repetition of verbal formulas could automatically guarantee their efficacy. The most popular repetitive ritual became the praying of the rosary, originally known as the Marian Psalter—150 “Hail Marys” divided into equal groups by ten “Our Fathers.” Prayer beads helped the worshipper keep track. According to Roman Catholic lore, the need for praying the Marian Psalter was revealed to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary during the thirteenth-century crusade against the Albigensian heretics, who stressed a radical duality between body and soul. The point of the Marian Psalter was not meditation but repetition of words with (one hoped) magical efficacy.
Theologians opposed magical thinking but accepted the consequences of earlier syncretic strategies, which church authorities had deployed when they preserved the veneration of holy wells, trees, and stones by turning pagan sites into Christian ones and substituting saints for pagan divinities. Sometimes the pagan divinities survived, in all but name. On the eve of the Reformation, English men and women inhabited a material universe pervaded by spiritual forces.
But by the mid-1500s, the more militant English Protestants—popularly known as Puritans—had pushed their protest beyond mere objection to the rule of Rome. They had begun challenging the Catholics’ animated universe, dismissing the attribution of magical powers to consecrated objects, scorning the celebration of feast days throughout the liturgical year. In the battle between Carnival and Lent, Puritans sought a permanent victory for Lent—and ultimately achieved it, at least as far as the traditional celebration of fleshly excess was concerned. Carnival celebrations devolved from liturgical feasts to market fairs as Puritanical sentiments spread, even among Anglicans. Yearnings for a kind of spiritual (as well as social) transparency spurred efforts to purify the practice of Christianity—to put plain speech in place of mumbo-jumbo, plain dress in place of excessive display, biblical truth in place of papal decree.
Political change licensed Puritanical frenzy. After 1558, when Elizabeth’s succession to the throne secured Protestant rule, militant mobs felt emboldened to smash icons, wreck churches, and burn down monasteries. Disdain for the claims of enchantment took vigorous popular form. At Downhead in Somerset, a man was heard to say his “mare will make as good holy water as any priest can.” Disenchanting the priests’ supposedly magical power was one of the priorities of Protestant business. Orthodox theologians, Anglican and Puritan, rejected claims for the sacraments’ magical efficacy; so, eventually, did Counter-Reformation Catholic theologians, responding to Protestant critiques of Romish superstition. Many Christians of various denominations reasserted the divide between a transcendent God and a fallen world. In subsequent decades, some would embrace René Descartes’s philosophical restatement of this dualism: man was the only creature with a “rational soul”; the others were mere automata. It would be hard to find a more disenchanted vision of the universe.
Yet as Keith Thomas and other historians have made clear, the cosmos of the early modern West remained enchanted in many ways, for most people. Even the most militant Protestants (indeed sometimes especially they) inhabited a universe enveloped with spiritual significance; they heard voices, saw visions, and dreamed divinatory dreams. In many English minds, the everyday world of common sense coexisted with another, enchanted one, shimmering and fluid, washing up along the shores of consciousness, seeping into the interior.
This was how the animated universe survived, in fits and starts, in eddies and backwaters. Long after the Reformation, among common folk but also many of the more educated, the nonhuman universe remained enchanted. Animals retained their significance as messengers from the unseen world, who might possess preternatural power for good or ill—dogs had a sixth sense of danger; cats and other creatures could still be witches’ familiars; magpies and ravens still served as omens and auguries—and astrology survived as a system of cosmic correspondences that explained otherwise inexplicable occurrences. Among English Protestants, the process of disenchantment was fitful, uneven, and incomplete.
Yet Protestantism was not the only challenge to medieval enchantment. A more potent alternative was what McCarraher calls “the religion of modernity”—the emergent belief system generated by modern capitalism, which involved not the disenchantment but the misenchantment of the world in the service of a new deity, money. The nascent capitalist worldview, like its Christian rivals, reflected the upheavals, scarcities, and insecurities of everyday life in early modern London. The desperate search for reliable sustenance ranged well beyond the precincts of poverty. Ambitious young men without a trade were dependent on political preferment, which in turn might be dependent on military adventure, including expeditions to America sponsored by men with mobile capital in search of investment opportunities. The omnipresence of risk facilitated the emergence of a commercial and financial system based on credit—an invisible force that was meant to rationalize risk but also, paradoxically, reinforced it. The presence or absence of credit could generate overnight rise or ruin.
Belief in the possibility of magical self-transformations was one of many religious features accompanying the rise of capitalism. The capitalist religion of modernity, as both its creators and critics realized, invoked divine sanctions for commerce and incorporated the fetishistic appeal of commodities. But the most fundamentally religious dimension of capitalist misenchantment was the mysterious power of money to reconstitute the essence of value—to transform it from something comparatively stable to something fluid and ever-changing.
The liberal philosopher John Locke celebrated money’s transformative powers when he distinguished between use value and monetary value, declaring his preference for the latter because it “altered the intrinsic value of things.” Money possessed the power to beget more money, especially when it took the impalpable form of credit—a concept that revealed its religious roots in its etymological descent from credo: “I believe.” Finance capital, trading in invisible assets, was a faith-based enterprise; fortunes were made and lost on the basis of fantasy, rumor, and fear. Centuries before Keynes was born, speculative capitalists were demonstrating the accuracy of his insight.
To be sure, there were other sorts of capitalists at work in the early modern world as well, notably the sort devoted to calculation, efficiency, double-entry bookkeeping, and disciplined achievement as a way of life—Weber’s ideal type of early modern man, whose Protestant ethic was turning into a spirit of capitalism. Some finance capitalists undoubtedly resembled the Weberian type in certain ways, but many cultivated a more emotionally charged ethos, one more attuned to the fluctuations of the emerging business cycle.
While the notion of animal spirits captured the emotional turbulence at the core of capitalism, it also illuminated alternative visions of universal animacy—some rooted in sacramental tradition, others resonating with newer forms of enchantment. The English Reformation was a time (and place) of religious searching, along and outside the borders of orthodoxy. Few seekers left a more revealing record than the poet and preacher John Donne.
Donne’s poems evoked a vibrant state of being—above and below theological controversy—where flesh and spirit merge in ecstatic union. T. S. Eliot glimpsed this synthetic vision in his classic essay “The Metaphysical Poets.” According to Eliot, these poets felt their thought “as immediately as the colour of a rose.” Donne, for Eliot, was an especially strong example of this immediacy. “A thought to Donne was an experience,” Eliot wrote, “it modified his sensibility.” But from Eliot’s view, Donne was among the last of his kind. The capacity to fuse thought and feeling, Eliot thought, had fallen victim to a “dissociation of sensibility” in the later seventeenth century. In fact, that fusion had survived, and Donne was a key figure in its survival.
A BRACELET OF BRIGHT HAIR ABOUT THE BONE: JOHN DONNE
Donne was born in 1572 to a prominent Catholic family and brought up amid long-standing resentment of Protestant persecution. One of his great-great-great-uncles was the martyred Thomas More, and his uncle Jasper Haywood was a Jesuit priest who had been banished from England for sedition. Donne’s father, a successful ironmonger who kept his Catholicism to himself, died when John was four. His mother soon remarried a physician with friends at Court, who was also a camouflaged Catholic. Recalling his youth, Donne acknowledged his own “hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning and languages,” which was its own form of “voluptuousness.” He entered Oxford at twelve, accompanied by his brother Henry, who was a year younger. (Precocious enrollments were not unusual at the time.) Four years later the boys were withdrawn by their family, so they could avoid taking the required Oath of Allegiance to the Protestant crown. Like other literate young men with connections at Court, Donne took to reading law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Early on he discovered his passion for poetry. “Though like the Pestilence and old fashion’d love,” he wrote, “Ridlingly it catch men.” A big part of its appeal, for Donne, was the opportunity it provided to celebrate the melding of romantic and erotic experience—and also to imbue sentimental conventions (or what would later become sentimental conventions) with larger philosophical significance. In Donne’s early lyrics, his biographer John Stubbs writes, “matters of the heart become matter.” Lovers are emotionally entangled through things left behind after lovemaking—trinkets, keys, and the like. In popular romances, this became a familiar device, but for Donne it had a larger significance, connecting with his lifelong conviction that matter could be infused with spirit.
Donne’s poetry posed a powerful counterpoint to the separation of disembodied, analytical mind from inert, manipulatable matter, partly by exploring the limits of the quantitative thinking that underwrote those dualities. Mathematically literate, Donne was aware of the advances in that discipline during his lifetime toward the expansion of a symbolic mathematical language. Yet he was also aware that mathematical symbols, despite their apparently objective existence in the world, were in fact humanly fashioned cognitive structures that frame our perceptions of the world and shape our orientation to it.
Not everything is best apprehended through numbers, as Donne realized, and his poetry illuminates the areas of human experience that resist quantitative measurement. “The Computation” deploys hyperbole to show how inadequately numbers convey an anxious lover’s impatient wait for his inamorata: by the end, the “years, since yesterday” amount to 2,400; every hour has seemed like a hundred years. This trope, too, becomes a sentimental convention, but the idea behind it has a place in the subsequent history of philosophy. Donne’s poem anticipates (by three centuries) the philosopher Henri Bergson’s experience-centered notion of time as “duration.” The quantification of time was a key example of the modern effort to objectify subjective experience, using the apparent precision of numbers to create the impression that the immeasurable had been successfully measured. From Donne to Bergson, devotees of animal spirits and their vitalist fellow travelers would challenge the quantifiers’ claim.
For all its intellectual ambition, Donne’s poetry could also celebrate the pleasures of the flesh for their own sake. In “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” he lovingly describes each article of clothing as the woman removes it, concluding with an exuberant apostrophe:
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
Yet from early on, celebrating the pleasures of the flesh was also compensation for pain incurred elsewhere. Poetry, Donne wrote in 1593, was a “cherishing fyre which dryes in mee / Griefe which did drowne mee.” He was grieving over the death of his brother Henry, who had been arrested for harboring a fugitive Jesuit and imprisoned at plague-ridden Newgate, where he died within weeks. John blamed the rigidity of the Catholic resistance for placing his brother at the mercy of the merciless Protestant state. The poet had begun to realize that there was no career path forward for a young Catholic who sought a place at Court. One way to signal his fealty to the Protestant regime was to volunteer for one of Elizabeth’s many military missions against the Spanish, an assault on Cádiz. It turned into an ordeal of fetid nights belowdecks, oppressive days on deck in still, relentless heat, and fitful fights with the Spanish that left scorched bodies flailing helplessly in the sea. Still, it was a politically useful signal of Donne’s break with the Roman Catholic Church—a good career move, with no harm in repeating it. He volunteered for a similar mission to the Azores in 1597.
Donne’s break with Catholicism left him metaphysically at sea. He had grown skeptical of all doctrinal claims, suspicious that there were political motives behind them—as indeed there often were, on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide. Court life was a never-ending round of self-interested jostling for advantage—a vision of hell, as far as Donne was concerned. In his poems he tried to refine his notion of patriotism, distinguishing between “a rotten state” and “England, to whome we owe, what we be, and have.”
Yet, soon after he returned from the Azores, he attached himself to that rotten state, by securing a court position as secretary to Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal. Among other responsibilities, Egerton headed the government effort to imprison, torture, and execute leading Catholics who refused to bend a knee to the new regime. Donne served (however indirectly) as a cog in the machinery of that systematic suppression. Though Donne always opposed torture, he blamed the Roman Catholic minority for their refusal to accept what he had come to believe was legitimate political authority.
He was also engaged in a private search for the best path to eternity— a Protestant quest that revealed a shift in his sensibility, though not in his fundamental beliefs. His quest was epitomized by “The Relic.” The poem revealed a complex blend of Catholic and Protestant impulses, along with other divisions that haunted early modern minds—flesh and spirit, body and soul, life and death. Addressed to a departed lover, “The Relic” begins in a graveyard, with a reminder that cemetery space was limited in London and existing graves were often disturbed to entomb new occupants:
When my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain …
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls, at the last busy day,
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?
Donne imagines a sympathetic gravedigger, who believes that he has uncovered the remains of a “loving couple” lying together. The “bracelet of bright hair,” he assumes, is a clever “device” that links the couple’s bodies after death and allows their souls to find each other at this very spot on “the last busy day” of the resurrection. The gravedigger refrains from disturbing the grave, and the poem proceeds to envision how in a time of “misdevotion” the grave becomes an object of pilgrimage, the bracelet a venerated relic. True devotion, Donne implies, would be directed not to the bracelet but to the actual miracle of the love it represented. Despite his embrace of this Protestant sentiment, the ex-Catholic in Donne remained fascinated by a relic’s power to meld bodies and souls.
Copyright © 2023 by Jackson Lears